Tape-like adhesive or touch-and-close closure parts are readily available on the market in a plurality of embodiments. The known adhesive closures generally have two parts in the form of male or female engagement parts. The male engagement parts are formed from a hook-shaped or mushroom-shaped closure material as interlocking parts on which female engagement parts in the form of a hook or fleece material can be fastened, if the two engagement parts are connected to one another with the formation of the actual adhesive closure. These interlocking parts can be repeatedly detached from one another and connected to one another. The primary applications for these adhesive closures are generally in the clothing industry. They are also the subject matter of technical applications, for example, as fasteners for wall and panel linings in motor vehicles and the like.
The tape-like adhesive closures can be obtained in one piece from plastic material by conventional forming processes. However, at least parts of these adhesive closures can be obtained by weaving and/or knitting from a plastic fiber material. The plastic material used is generally colorless or has a dyed basic shade originating from the extrusion process. This coloring generally makes it difficult to adapt the finished adhesive closure products to color factors, as arise, for example, from fabric colors in the clothing and textile industry. In particular, when only small numbers of adhesive closures of a specific color are required, it poses problems for the manufacturer to set up the entire production process for a small batch with a definable color of the plastic material.
To remedy this situation, EP 1 502 988 A1 suggests dyeing and/or printing adhesive closure parts formed mainly of plastic material by dye application nozzles. The ejection of solvent-containing dye is triggered by a piezo crystal. In this way, very small dye volumes, in the pictoliter range, can be applied in droplets with a very high application frequency to the respective engagement part of the adhesive band closure. Proceeding from a colorless, preferably transparent base material or one with basic dyeing, dyeing tasks can be performed within a wide scope. Depending on the chosen dye, small numbers of engagement parts can be treated in terms of dye and configuration. Furthermore, a specific dye pattern can be implemented on the engagement part with the respective dye application nozzle to apply characters of number or letter sequences. In particular, with the known solutions, dye or print small production amounts of closure material are possible without the remaining production process for the engagement parts.
In the known solution, the dyes applied are inks, in particular reactive inks, acid inks, or dispersion inks. These inks contain solvents so that they are not especially suitable for marking of adhesive closure parts used in the food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical domain. Especially in very long lasting operations with numerous washing processes, the ink used fades, reducing the clarity of the ink coating with time and leading to an unattractive appearance. The inks are often not lightfast and fade accordingly strongly upon exposure to solar radiation.
WO 98/39 759 A1 discloses a method in which for dyeing and/or printing of adhesive closure parts solvent-based inks, curable inks and water-based inks are used as the dye medium. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,910,353 B2, for a comparable application, water-based inks with acrylate binders are used and are applied by flexographic printing methods. DE 698 13 177 T2 discloses using solvent-free waxes in the form of hot melt ink compositions for printing of porous substrates for producing bar codes.